My Kind of Jazz

Ron Hawking breaks free of Sinatra

October 16, 2009|By Howard Reich

For the past decade, Chicagoan Ron Hawking has been paying musical homage to his heroes.

One-man shows such as "His Way: A Tribute to the Man and the Music" (which revisited hits of Frank Sinatra) and its follow-up, "The Men and Their Music" (a salute to Ray Charles, Bobby Darin, the Rat Pack and others) proved immensely popular. In effect, they gave Hawking a kind of artistic identity (albeit a borrowed one), after decades of anonymity singing jingles.

So, perhaps it was inevitable that Hawking would step wholly into the spotlight and start focusing on a singer apart from Sinatra and his circle: Ron Hawking himself.

In his new cabaret show, "Ron Hawking and Friends" (playing Saturday night and Sept. 24 at Davenport's), the singer traces a memoir of his life in music. By recalling the music that has inspired him since childhood, he lets listeners know that there's more to his art than musical impersonations.

"It took a lot of sweat to do this new show," says Hawking, who never has done anything quite like it.

"While I was putting this together, I was literally waking up in the middle of the night and thinking, 'I've got this thing at Davenport's, and I still don't have a piano player, I still don't know what songs I'm going to do.'"

More important, Hawking had to segue from telling Sinatra's story -- or Darin's or Brother Ray's -- to telling his own.

It's one worth hearing. A precocious artist who was singing on Chicago TV shows as a kid, Hawking launched his adult career working jazz rooms and restaurants across the city, in the early 1970s. When the jingles business started booming in Chicago -- and across America -- throughout the '70s and '80s, he found himself in nearly constant demand as a voice-over artist. But impersonating Charlie the Tuna for Star Kist and Nat "King" Cole for Hershey's did not do a great deal to enhance Hawking's profile as an artist.

A battle with cancer in the 1990s prompted Hawking to reassess.

"While I was sick, I said to myself that if I get a second chance, I'm just going to put my talents out there and take my shot," Hawking once told the Tribune. "I went through hell for six months of chemotherapy, I was out of work for a year, and I saw the possibility of not coming out of it.

"But I vowed that I would come back, and that I would come out to play hardball, because I lost a year of my life, and I wanted to make up time."

Did he ever. Hawking's Sinatra tribute, "His Way," ran for eight months at the Mercury Theatre, on North Southport Avenue, from 1998 to '99. Further, it earned him engagements across the country and precipitated his next successful show, "The Men and Their Music."

Both hits made it clear to many listeners that Hawking ought to be singing Hawking, which he belatedly has begun to do.

Not that it's easy to forge a career singing pre-rock standards these days. Audiences that flocked to hear Hawking reflecting on Sinatra do not necessarily seek out Hawking's more personal fare. And crowds that have swarmed the Mercury Theatre and other Hawking locales may not necessarily run to a tiny club such as Davenport's, on a funky stretch of North Milwaukee Avenue.

Nevertheless, Hawking has to do this work -- his way.

"I'm not exactly a youngster that's going to attract the younger demographic," says the singer, acknowledging the struggle.

Still, "I have to keep developing this."

Bravo for that.

Also worth catching:

"Dianne Reeves With Strings Attached." Reeves owns one of the more luxuriant instruments in jazz. The strings accompanying her won't be violins and violas but, rather, guitars, played by Russell Malone and Romero Lubambo.

8 p.m. Friday at the McAninch Arts Center at the College of DuPage, Fawell and Park boulevards, Glen Ellyn; $36-$46; 630-942-4000

Von Freeman Quintet. The master saxophonist recently turned 87 but still plays like a dream, relentlessly searching for new sounds. Lately, he seems to have picked up the tempo of his bookings, including this welcome, two-night engagement at one of the best places to hear him.

NRG Ensemble. Listeners who have been following jazz in Chicago for decades will remember Hal Russell, the saxophone firebrand and new-music inventor who presided over his incendiary NRG Ensemble. Saxophonist Mars Williams, cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, bassist Kent Kessler, multi-instrumentalist Brian Sandstrom and drummer Steve Hunt will explore the inextinguishable spirit of Russell and his music.